—Franz Boas, German-American pioneer anthropologist, Anthropology and Modern Life
In our reading of the myths we have seen that they functioned as the science, history, religion, philosophy, and literature of traditional cultures. In today’s world, however, we have carefully separated science and myth, even placing them in opposition to each other. But science and myth—or, by extension, science and religion—are two very different things directed toward two very different questions.
Science tells us how things happen; myth (and religion) tells us why they happen. Science relies on objective observation to show us the causes of things. Myth and religion rely on things beyond our senses, our faculty of “feeling,” in order to show us a purpose.
In traditional cultures, human beings had a sense of purpose in life. However, to our way of thinking, they needlessly suffered from diseases and hardship due to the lack of technology and science. While science has created dramatic improvements in the quality of human life, individuals now suffer from a lack of meaning. In our most advanced cultures we see illnesses and social problems relating to this deficiency: suicide, alcoholism, mental disorders, and other problems that are associated with a modern, rather than a traditional, society.
Contemporary culture has tenuously tried to reconcile science and religion, at times even trying to eliminate the mythic element of religion altogether. This rationalist attitude is called “secular humanism” by religious fundamentalists. Although the term is widely ridiculed, there is some validity to it. The modern worldview is “secular” in that it rejects the operation of the supernatural in the world. However, it is not “humanistic” in the classical sense of the word. Humanism originally stood for understanding the human condition, the idea that “the proper study of man is man,” and stressed the value of the individual. Industrialized society, and post-industrial society, in contrast, has made many of us feel as if we are mere “units” or “numbers.” This is the result of a loss of meaning that myth traditionally provided. “Secular humanism” is, essentially, “life without myth.”*
If science and myth are two very different things directed toward two very different questions, why then do we perceive them to be mortal enemies, their validity seen by some as mutually exclusive?
One of the by-products of the scientific revolution is causative thinking: the reduction of every phenomenon to its cause through observation with the five senses (“empirically”), and then the formulation of laws to predict future behavior.
Myth and religion, in contrast, are not causative—they do not rely on empirical observation but on the human faculties of “feeling” and “belief.” They attempt to explain for us things that are beyond the range of our senses: the human place in the universe, the place of the individual in the world, and so forth.
The difference between causative and purposive thinking can be best illustrated by using the analogy of a wristwatch. You may take the wristwatch apart, spring by spring, gear by gear, and with any luck you can observe what causes it to work. (I have mastered taking it apart; putting it back together still eludes me!) However, knowing how the watch works tells you nothing of why you need to know what time it is, how to tell time, or why we consider punctuality to be important—the purposes of the watch. Knowing how your watch works is of little comfort to you—or your boss—if you are late for work.
There is much good to be said about causative thinking. However, as Franz Boas wrote, it is not the final form of human thought. Particularly in the nineteenth century, there were people who thought just that, and they nearly rejected purposive thinking altogether. If causative thinking is taken to its extreme, then the validity of anything that cannot be observed empirically is in doubt. If a phenomenon cannot be reduced to an identifiable cause, then it is taken, in this way of thinking, as not “real.”
Because modern people have come to think in largely causative terms, this perspective has been a major factor in our culture. The materialist viewpoint rejects the existence of the “supernatural” or of “God,” calling it “unreal.” That is how myth came to mean “fiction.”
There has been a serious effort to reconcile the “myth” in Christianity and Judaism using causative thinking; that is, to “demythologize” them. As Hans Küng writes, the message was thrown out with the myth.
The definition of myth as “falsehood” has deep roots, which point to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
We all too often read of philosophers and philosophy in boring, wooden terms. But Hegel is an important source of our “modern” way of thinking about the “quality of life.”
A graduate of the University of Tübingen, he wrote to his friend Schelling for advice on a good place to live in Germany, where there were many good history books available and even ein gutes Bier (“a good local beer”). Because Hegel had inherited a pretty sizable sum of money, he was free to live and teach virtually anywhere he wished. But Schelling advised him to go to Jena, where there was good beer, many books, and the philosphy of history was discussed and debated. After reading a great deal on the history of Greece and Rome (and perhaps after a few beers), Hegel announced that history worked along certain observable lines.
All history is an irresistible advancement of humankind, a technological, philosophical, and even moral progression with each new stage of history more enlightened than the last. This view of history, like that of Christianity and Judaism, is linear, moving in a straight line toward a utopian end. Hegel’s speculations are interesting and have been used as arguments both to support Christianity and to demonstrate that it is “outmoded,” “unscientific,” and “irrational.”
Hegel believed that history operates as an observable process with identifiable laws and “causes” that work continuously to produce human progress. History is not merely a collection of random events arranged in chronological order but a true process that represents a “spirit” at work.
The process of history is presided over by a “dominant” people. In the earliest phases of civilized history, a period Hegel called the “Semitic” phase, the Jews and other Near Eastern peoples were the dominant “guardians of civilization.” Next, in the “Classical” phase, the Greeks and Romans were in charge. Hegel felt that his own times were the “Germanic” phase, in which the Germans, English, and other northern Europeans were the “dominant” force in propelling history forward. Hegel’s philosophy thus became a root of modern democratic liberalism, Nazism, and communism.
Compare Hegel’s view of history with that held by traditional societies, in which human history, per se, was of little value, only a replay of the events portrayed in the myths.
Hegel maintained that history progresses through “dialectics.” Using dialectics, one statement, the thesis, is contrasted with its opposite, or antithesis, to produce a new idea, the synthesis. Marx’s theory of communism, for instance, held that class struggle between the workers (thesis) and capital, or industry owners (antithesis), would produce socialism (synthesis); all history would thus be propelled toward the utopia of pure communism. Marxism is an excellent example of Hegel’s concept of linear history at work.
Hegel wrote that the most primitive stage of religious development is the “nature religion” or “sorcery” stage. From that level humankind progresses to monotheism—in his words, the recognition of “the spiritual individuality of God.” At this stage God is no longer an anthropomorphic projection speaking through history but a transcendent spirit that is perceived to act in history.
Hegel believed that the great work of God in history was in the mission of Jesus Christ to reconcile God and mankind. As a result of the death of Christ, the union between God and man ceases to be a “fact” but is rather a “vital idea” that directs people’s lives, giving them a purpose.
The New Hegelians
The New Hegelians were not a British punk rock band; they were, rather, a major force in the “demythologization
” of Western culture.
After Hegel’s death one group of his followers, the “Old” Hegelians, used his philosophical system to defend Christianity from another group of his followers, the “New” Hegelians. The New Hegelians were strongly influenced by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who felt that anything that could not be demonstrated empirically (by observation of the five senses) or that was logically self-evident, was invalid.
The New Hegelians felt that the forward progression of history called for a rational examination of Christianity, which was perceived as “outmoded;” the progression of history required a new religious view that could stand the test of empirical study. As rationalists and empiricists, they believed that myth and the supernatural elements of religion were outside the realm of objective proof and were “fiction.” They were skeptical of all revealed religions because they were based on “irrational” faith experience. They doubted whether any myth-based religious system would survive in the “scientific” nineteenth century.
David Friedrich Strauss of Germany (1808-1874) was the most influential of the New Hegelians. Strauss felt that Christianity needed to be studied from a historical perspective, following Hegel’s framework. Strauss wrote a then-controversial book that portrayed Jesus Christ as an ordinary historical character, the natural son of Mary and Joseph. He rejected the supernatural elements of the Gospels.
In France as well, Ernest Renan (1823-1892), influenced by Hegel and Strauss, outraged the French public with a “demythologized” biography of Jesus that omitted any reference to the supernatural. He called it a “historicized” gospel. For Renan, as for Strauss, the “new” religion of the West would have to be a rational, demythologized view of a historical Jesus with an emphasis on ethical teaching.
Another New Hegelian was Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), an associate of Strauss and an erstwhile collaborator of Karl Marx. Bauer wrote that the Gospels were complete fabrications, unable to stand the tests of Hegelian historical proof, and he went so far as to question the historical existence of Jesus Christ.
Again recall Janet’s statement that a society abandons its myth when the gods fail to speak. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the “gods” appeared to have very little to say.
German Form Criticism of the Bible
A group of German biblical scholars and theologians decided to undertake a critical historical analysis of the Bible that proved an invaluable contribution to both biblical scholarship and the demythologization of culture.
The best known of these was Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), who studied the New Testament, especially the writings of Saint Paul, in light of the historical circumstances—or Sitz im Leben (German for “setting in life”)—in which they were written. Baur was particularly interested in the conflicts in the early Christian churches.
Baur was succeeded by Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), who studied the development of the creeds in the early Christian church and determined that the conflict between the Church and the Gnostic heresy led to the development of the creeds. Harnack believed that the mythical or supernatural trappings of Scripture that were contained in the creeds were the product of this tension. Harnaek’s writing influenced both Karl Barth, the twentieth-century defender of traditional Christianity, and Rudolf Bultmann, the often controversial biblical scholar who endeavored to identify the “mythic” elements in Scripture.
Another influence that must be mentioned is Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), now remembered as a humanitarian, medical missionary, and concert organist. Schweitzer wrote a book called The Quest for the Historical Jesus, which stripped the Bible narrative of its supernatural trappings to show a Jesus who was a typical Jewish preacher with one message—the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. When no apocalypse appeared, Schweitzer maintained, Jesus died an embittered man. His followers wrote the Gospels, adding supernatural elements, in an effort to make sense of the life and ministry of Christ.
Finally, there was the controversial Rudolf Bultmann of Germany (1884-1976), who viewed the New Testament texts as essentially mythical and attempted to separate the mythic from the historic in the accounts of Jesus’ life.*
Positivism and Logical Positivism
A major philosophical assault on the validity of the supernatural was positivism, the philosophy of August Comte (1798-1857) of France. It is in his philosophy that modern materialism, and the interpretations of myth offered by both Freud and Lévi-Strauss, have their antecedent.
He believed that the scientific method could be applied to the study of any phenomenon and certainly to human behavior, making Comte the founder of sociology and the other social sciences. Anything that could not be observed scientifically, in his view, did not exist.
Not at all a modest man, Comte asserted that his positivism was the third and last of three successive phases in the history of humankind. In the first, or “theological” stage, religion and myth were needed to explain all phenomena. The second, the “metaphysical,” stage was based on philosophical speculations about “ideals” or “absolutes.” In the stage of “positivism,” scientific observation alone would suffice. For Comte, causative thinking was the final form of thought.
Comte believed that religious beliefs based on the supernatural would soon be abandoned. So he founded his own “religion of humanity,” borrowing heavily on the ritual of Roman Catholicism. Comte instituted elaborate rites, complete with robes, incense, and liturgies. This religion was described by his contemporaries as “Catholicism without Christianity.” Comte “demythologized” the calendar by providing months named “Gutenberg” and “Shakespeare.”
Like any good eccentric, Comte had some very entertaining inconsistencies. Although he largely lived off his wife’s income—he was married to a prostitute who shocked him by offering to “entertain” wealthy clients—Comte kept a ledger of every penny, including the change in his pants pockets. He was fond of wearing the robes and vestments of his new “religion.”
His direct philosophical descendants were the twentieth-century Logical Positivists, including Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Logical Positivists believed that any statement that could not be empirically proved should be rejected. Logical Positivism relied on minute examinations of the use of language, and has not proved durable.
Die Wissenschaft des Judentums: The “Science” of Judaism
The demythologization process that profoundly affected Christianity had its parallel in Judaism. For a nineteenth-century German intellectual, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, there was no greater compliment than to be called wissenschaftlich, or “scientific.”
Prior to the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and its Jewish parallel, the Haskalah (Hebrew for “enlightenment”), there was but one sect in European Jewry, the Orthodox. There were differences, to be sure, between the Sephardic and Ashkenazic* rites, but in all cases, Judaism was a thoroughly orthodox and thoroughly “mythic” worldview, although the “mythological” in Judaism, as a monotheistic, revealed religion, was less advanced than in other world religions, and the nature of biblical and Talmudic Judaism was highly conservative.
Yet, the forces of empiricism were at work among European Jews, especially in Germany. The great Jewish Enlightenment thinker Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786)† mirrored the thoughts of many of his contemporaries.
It is true: I recognize no eternal truths, other than those which can not only be comprehended by human reason, but also demonstrated and verified by the human faculties.
The forces of “demythologization” and assimilation produced profound changes in European Judaism, characterized by the Reform movement in Germany. These forces were accelerated by the “emancipation” of the Jews—their guarantee of full civil and political rights—during the Napoleonic period. Soon, many German Jews began to think of Judaism as one of several “German” religions, destined to take its place beside Protestantism and Catholicism in “modern” Germany.
Reform Judaism was the expression of bo
th assimilation and demythologization. German, rather than Hebrew, was to be the language of public worship; all prayers describing the Jews as a “nation” were abandoned. In fact, the first Reform services, held in a “temple” rather than a synagogue, very closely resembled services held by their Lutheran neighbors. A follower of Moses Mendelssohn named David Friedlaender (1756-1834) was the “father” of Reform Judaism, even going so far as to ask the Lutheran authorities in Berlin to admit him as a Lutheran, provided that he and his followers were not required to accept the divinity of Jesus. They were refused.
In 1810, Israel Jacobson established the first Reform Jewish temple in the German state of Braunschweig—complete with German-language sermons and hymns, as well as organ music—previously unknown in Jewish worship. In 1849 Samuel Holdheim of the Berlin temple went so far as to hold services on Sundays.
Contemporary with these innovations, Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) exhorted Reform Jews to review the Scriptures from a “scientific and historical” point of view, in short, a demythologized approach, which emphasized the ethical teachings of Judaism while rejecting many traditional practices, including dietary laws, circumcision, and the divine origins of the Torah.
In Germany, an effort to demythologize Judaism (as the New Hegelians were doing to Protestant Christianity) focused on Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), who founded a movement called Die Wissenschaft des Judentums, or “The Science of Judaism.” It was his goal to establish a systematic and scientific study of the Jews and their history (conducted in German, of course) that emphasized the communal, rather than the religious, aspects of Judaism.
Reform Judaism was carried to the United States by immigrants, where it flourished beyond the highest hopes of its German founders. The basic statement of a demythologized Reform Judaism can be found in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885:
We hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domains of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism, the Bible reflecting the primitive idea of its own age and at times clothing its conception of divine providence and justice dealing with man in miraculous narratives.
Parallel Myths Page 33